WBNL keeps its focus on the community | VIDEO

Ralph Turpen has owned and run 1540 WBNL in Boonville for the last 10 years.

None

Bailey Loosemore / Special to The Courier & Press
Ralph Turpen and Larry Schweizer chat back and forth during the Trading Post, a segment where community members can trade, sell or give away their personal items.

Bailey Loosemore / Special to The Courier & Press
Ralph Turpen reads a letter from a WBNL listener in Nashville, Tenn.

Larry Schweizer sits in the main WBNL studio during his morning show.

WBNL is located at 2177 North State Route 61 in Boonville.

Bailey Loosemore / Special to The Courier & Press
Ralph Turpen takes off his shoes for the Trading Post segment.

Two satellite dishes sit in front of the WBNL studio in Boonville.

Five minutes to 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, Ralph Turpen puts on a pair of studio headphones and leans on his elbows toward a black microphone.

Sometime in the next 10 minutes he will get the chance to tell listeners his radio station's slogan — one in which he takes great pride — amidst recaps of a Chicago Cubs' game against the San Francisco Giants.

His eyes shift from the microphone to a clock on the wall in front of him and back. He nods his head to music.

"They're supposed to identify the station around the top of the hour," he says, "usually within three minutes of the hour."

At 2:05, he takes off the headphones and sets them back on the desk in front of him. This hour, he would not announce the station's name.

But there was never a need to do so. Everyone listening to AM 1540 WBNL knows exactly which station they're tuning into.

For the past 10 years, as of July 3, Turpen has made the station a household name.

WBNL, your hometown radio station, has brought music to Boonville since Jack Sanders and Norman Hall built the station in 1950. They began with a 250-Watt Gates Transmitter, a 195-foot tower and a building big enough to fit their minimal equipment and nothing else.

Now, the original building consists of the far wall of the main studio to the outer wall of the hallway outside of it and is surrounded by rooms built on to provide the station opportunities to create commercials, invite preachers to give Sunday sermons and allow community members rest in a waiting room.

In the late 1960s, Hall and Sanders added an FM station, 107.1, that has since been bought by John Patrick Englebrecht and turned into Evansville's Jack FM. Englebrecht originally bought both the AM and FM frequencies in 2000 but sold the AM frequency to Turpen a year later.

According to the station's website, Turpen brought with him upgraded programming and music as well as equipment and sound quality.

Turpen has been in the radio business for more than 50 years, with his first job at WEOA in the YMCA building downtown. He then worked at various other stations before taking a job at WIKY for 11 years. After WIKY, he accepted a job at Alcoa for 25 years, continuing to service other radio stations and managing WVHI at the same time. In 2000, he retired from Alcoa and managed WBNL before buying it in 2001.

"It was my personal goal to own and operate a popular radio station," Turpen said.

And in the Boonville community, WBNL is as popular as they come.

"The community has taken to our programming very well," Turpen said. "If we're not on the air, they call. They want to know why."

WBNL targets women who are 25 or older, Turpen said.

"Because they determine what is bought in the house," he added. "We automatically get the men because we carry sports. We have more local sports than any other station in the Tri-State area."

The station has carried Cubs games for more than 55 years, Turpen said, since Hall petitioned to become an affiliate. Presenting the baseball club with thousands of signatures from the area, Hall made WBNL the first Indiana affiliate and one of the first affiliates nationwide.

"Today is a rare day because they have a double hitter," Turpen said of the day the Cubs played the Giants. "We have a lot of people that follow the Cubs. They don't want to lose us, and we don't want to lose them."

When the station isn't playing Cubs games, they're playing a mixture of everything from oldies and country to classical and Lady Gaga.

"People get hooked on it," Turpen said.

Including a group of workers in Russia who tune into the after midnight programming and a businessman who listens from his computer in the middle of Manhattan, both utilizing the station's Internet streaming.

On June 19, David B. Jones in Nashville, Tenn., wrote a letter to the station after catching the frequency from 7 p.m. to 7:40 p.m one evening.

"If my request is of interest, please send me a confirmation of my reception of WBNL and please send me a coverage map," he wrote.

Turpen marvels at the distances AM frequencies can travel — farther than FM but with less power, but he is ready to put the WBNL name back on an FM frequency and is currently in the negotiation stage.

"A lot of people are more used to being on FM," he said. "It would be the same program."

As of now, WBNL skips the middle man and plays their programming through the old-fashioned AM frequency and over the new technology of Internet streaming, which boasts 3,000 to 5,000 listeners an hour.

"The future actually is in streaming," Turpen said.

Even with the plan to purchase a new frequency, however, Turpen said he may be ready to move on from the station in the next few years.

"I've had several offers over the years," he said. "From somebody who's maybe retired and has money and wants to play radio, I guess."

The Boonville community is close-knit, Turpen said, and they take pride in the local radio station that still announces obituaries and other local happenings."People want to hear it," Turpen said. "Bigger stations have gotten away from that. If the water's not running, they call here first. The electricity's out, they call here first. You call another station, they don't care."

But Turpen would rather be behind the scenes in broadcast engineering.

"When you're on the air, you're constantly relating to somebody or something," he said. "It's a constant conversation with one person or 1,000."

With engineering, Turpen would not have to be "on" all the time, and he admits that it's hard being a daily radio personality.

"People who listen on a regular basis like you to sound the same every day," Turpen said. "What they don't realize is I'm very quiet."

Still, the job hasn't come without some rewards.

"When you're out, people come up and give you a hug because they think they know you," Turpen said.

"At a county fair once, an 80-plus-year-old lady came up to me and asked for my autograph," he added. "That will never happen again."